Animation Techniques

© Copyright William Rowan 2007

Objective

By the end of this you will be able to:

• Use slides or other animation techniques to illustrate graphic design solutions

Using Slides

• How to use slides for the purpose of presentation has already being covered in a previous presentation called:

• “using_powerpoint”

Animation Techniques

• SolidWorks has a software add-in which will create animations for you

• If it is not turned on in your package you can do so by clicking on the “Tools” menu and selecting “Add-Ins”

Animation Techniques

• Select the “SolidWorks Animator” tick box to activate the animator

Animation Techniques

• This will now give you a new toolbar in the SolidWorks interface

Animation Techniques

• To start using SolidWorks animator click on the “Animation 1” tab at the bottom of the drawing

Animation Techniques

• This will open a new task plane

Animation Techniques

• To start creating the animation click on:

Animation Techniques

• This will open up a series of dialog boxes where you can set what you want to your animation to do

Animation Techniques

• When you press next you will see you can change the axis of rotation, the number of rotations and the direction of rotation

Animation Techniques

• The final thing you need to do is to set the duration of the animation

Animation Techniques

• Once this is done click on “Finish”

• The animation sequence shows on the timeline

Animation Techniques

• You can now play you’re your animation by clicking on the play button

• You can loop the sequence so that it is continuous by selecting the option

• You can save the animation SaveLoopPlay

Animation Techniques

Saving your animation

• Click on the “Save” tab

• This will open a dialog box where you can select the location of the animation and you can name the animation as well

Animation Techniques

Animation Techniques

NB:

• When saving save the file as in the “Microsoft AVI File” format (.avi) as you can then insert it into PowerPoint

Animation Techniques

• Click on “Save” and when the next dialog box appears click OK for video compression

• The file will then be compressed into the video format

• Compression impacts the image quality and the file size• The higher the compression rate the higher the image quality and the larger

the file size• The lower the compression rate the lower the image quality and the smaller

the file size

Animation Techniques

• To insert the animation into PowerPoint simply click on the “Insert” menu and select “Movies and Sounds” and then “Movies from File”

Animation Techniques

• In the dialog window select the location and movie you want to insert and select “OK”

Samples

Samples

Now you try!

• Create a drawing in SolidWorks or use one you have already created and animate it

• Once you have this done insert it into PowerPoint and create a presentation about the object (max 5 slides)